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Foreigners buy quarter of homes

A quarter of all properties sold in Portugal last year were sold to foreign buyers, according to a report in Thursday’s edition of the Diário de Notícias. The newspaper writes that a growing number of foreigners, particularly French and Brazilian nationals, were responsible for many of the 150,000 property purchases registered in this country in 2017. Last year also saw a rise of more than 25 percent in terms of property sales on 2016.

The Association of Estate Agents in Portugal (APEMIP) revealed this week that one in four homes sold last year in the country ended up in foreign hands.While Brazilians and French are queuing up at estate agencies, British and Chinese buyers have also increased their stake in the national real estate market.Foreigners’ seemingly endless hunger for property in Portugal has also resulted in a strong increase in property prices. Despite prices being catapulted to pre-crisis levels, sales as a whole have continued to rise, and were up by between 25 and 30 percent in 2017. Overall, more than 400 properties were sold every day last year.APEMIP President Luís Lima said this week that his association had anticipated these highly positive figures at the beginning of last year, and current projections “allow us to forecast that the real estate market will grow once again in 2018.”He added that even with prices soaring in the Portuguese capital, foreign buyers have maintained their interest as prices are still below other major cities, coupled with Lisbon’s offering of better safety and good weather.The association has also indicated that an estimated 30 percent of all property sales in Portugal are conducted without a real estate agent acting as a mediator, which could bring the number of sales in 2017 up to an estimated figure of around 215,000.Property prices have meanwhile shown no sign of slowing down. According to the most recent Housing Price Index issued by Idealista, the average cost of a square metre in Lisbon rose to 2,796 euros in December, an increase of 36.92 percent on 12 months earlier.Elsewhere, property prices climbed by 23.67 percent in Porto, while they were up by 18 percent in the Algarve. The national average showed a price hike of 25.09 percent in the space of one year.Statistics relating to Lisbon for the period January 2016 to June 2017, meanwhile, revealed that foreigners spend around 94,000 euros more on a home than their Portuguese counterparts.

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